Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes

One of the highlights from " Second City Television Series" (SCTV) from around 1980: Canadian actor Joe Flaherty as "Count Floyd", spoofing the over zealous late-night horror film hosts of local television during the pre-satellite television era.

The Original Nightmare Star: Lon Chaney Sr.

Silent film star Lon Chaney did his own make-up, creating a panoply of monsters and bizarre figures that paved the way for later actors in horror films to try and keep up with.   

One of those landmark films was the original "Phantom of the Opera" from 1925.  Seeing it late one night in a empty house waiting for my parents to return from some social event, I was about ten years old at the time, and had only seen the silent films of Charlie Chaplin, which gave me the impression that silent films were not the province of horror. 

   I didn't reckon on  "The Man of a Thousand Faces".

Other than the German version of the "Dracula"story by Bram Stoker,  "Nosfuatu" (1922) , no film of the silent era kept me awake like that ever again!   

Long years playing roles in theater had given Chaney the chance to perfect his skills as a master of  make-up techniques.  Many of the roles he played-a character without legs, or arms,  the famous hunchback of Medieval Paris, et al, --called for such physical demands on him that one wonders if he had a penchant for some sort of self-punishment. From Wikipedia: 

"Following the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923, Chaney was once again given the freedom to create his own make-up as the Phantom, a habit which became almost as famous as the films he starred in. Chaney painted his eye sockets black, giving a skull-like impression to them. He also pulled the tip of his nose up and pinned it in place with wire, enlarged his nostrils with black paint, and put a set of jagged false teeth into his mouth to complete the ghastly deformed look of the Phantom. When audiences first saw The Phantom of the Opera, they were said to have screamed or fainted at the scene where Christine pulls the concealing mask away, revealing his skull-like features to the audience.

"Chaney's appearance as the Phantom in the film has been the most accurate depiction of the title character, based on the description given in the novel, where Erik the Phantom is described as having a skull-like face with a few wisps of black hair on top of his head. As in the novel, Chaney's Phantom has been deformed since birth, rather than having been disfigured by acid or fire, as in later adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera."

Chaney was a major  star in the 1920's and his films the one pictured above--the famous unmasking scene-- I considered quite shocking due to the frightening make-up he employed and the sense of gothic menace created by big studio cinematographers. 

Lon Chaney, the father of future Universal horror star Lon Chaney Junior--whose most memorable role was in several "Wolf Man" films--played a rich variety of roles.  A tough no-nonsense Marine in "Tell It To The Marines" (1927), a bone-tired and cynical detective in "While The City Sleeps" (1929) and a carnival hustler turned crook in "The Unholy Three" (1924).   That persona, of a tough guy who could also be noble, was similar to the star persona that Humphrey Bogart carried off two decades later. 

  But it was in his grotesque, expressionistic parts that he established his star power, a legend that was cut short near the end of the Silent Era with his death from lung cancer at age 46. He also played a Scotland Yard investigator  posing as a vampire to trap a killer in the now-lost "London After Midnight" (1927), perhaps the most sought-after missing feature  of the late silent era.  (A photo of the character he played is to the left.) 

The senior Chaney made it a point to be as invisible as possible  to the public between his roles on the screen.  He must have thought the less he spoke of himself, the more power his persona in whatever part he choose to play.   In a rare bit or relveation, he wrote of his work in a film magazine. 

 "I wanted to remind people that the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice," Chaney wrote in Movie magazine. "The dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals. Most of my roles since The Hunchback, such as The Phantom of the Opera, He Who Gets Slapped, The Unholy Three, etc., have carried the theme of self-sacrifice or renunciation. These are the stories which I wish to do."

 Chaney's parents were both deaf and so the pantomime acting required for silent films came to him very easy--he had been communicating with gestures and facial expressions all of his young life.      

It's conceded by most film historians I've read that Chaney would have likely starred in both the original "Dracula"  film as the Count and as the Monster in "Frankenstein", both made at his original studio, Universal. "Dracula" was directed by his freguent collaborator, Todd Browning.  

Instead those films made stars of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.  Thanks to television revivals,  they became stars, and Karloff's career was as successful as Chaney's.  But for that vacuum of the loss of "The Man of A Thousand Faces", they might never have become household names in their own lifetimes.   

But thanks  to DVD releases and repackaging of silent films by The Criterion Collection and Kino Video,  this elder master of horror is getting some of his due back these days.  The movie viewers are the better I think for seeing what scared us then...and might   chill us still...

  

Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride" (2005): Piano Duet

This dark gothic comedy by Tim Burton gave the added treat of a soundtrack by his longtime musical composer partner, Danny Elfman. Here's a little gem of that soundtrack from the movie.

I couldn't download off the film itself due to embedding restrictions but here is the animated sequence via youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuEOA9GbK6U&feature=related
As Victor Von Dort (Johnny Depp) says in the movie: "Pardon my enthusiasm."

"The Bride of Frankenstein" and "Gods and Monsters"

Universal Studios  "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935)  is generally considered to be, along with "King Kong" at RKO Pictures to be the penultimate early sound horror films of the American screen. The Bride was directed by James Whale, who had come to Hollywood in 1930 to make 'Journey's End", a popular play about British rank soldiers and officers in the trenches during World War I. He also directed the original "Waterloo Bridge" 

 Because of the success of that play-to-movie he got the job of directing the original "Frankenstein" (1931) released in time for Christmas of that year.   A good deal of the film's "outdoor" sets were for the World War picture were reused for this version. 

Universal  originally wanted the Biggest horror star of that all, Lon Chaney, Sr., to play the monster if they could get him on loan from MGM.  Chaney's death from cancer prevented that option, so the role was next offered to Bela Lugosi who had scored well with audiences as "Dracula". But Lugosi to his later regret turned down the role because  "the Monster" had no dialogue. 

Director Whale then saw Boris Karloff in the commissary at the studio.  (from the Moviediva website.)   

"Karloff was the last to be cast in the original Frankenstein, the monster's look conceptualized by Whale and then detailed by make-up's mad genius, Jack Pierce. Whale told the NY Times, "Karloff's face has always fascinated me, and I made drawings of his head, added sharp bony ridges where I imagined the skull might have been joined. His physique was weaker than I could wish, but that queer penetrating personality of his I felt was more important than his shape, which could easily be altered." There had been Frankenstein plays, and on stage, for some reason, the monster's skin had often been blue. This might have influenced Pierce's choice to color the Monster's skin with a blue-green greasepaint that would photograph "a corpse-like grey." They envisioned the top of the skull like a cigar box, "We had to surmise that brain after brain had been tried in that poor skull, inserted and taken out again. That is why we built up the forehead to convey the impression of demoniacal surgery. Then we found the eyes were too bright, seemed too understanding, where dumb bewilderment was so essential. So, I waxed my eyes to make them heavy, half-seeing," said Karloff. The result: "This, like the face of Garbo, is one of the icons of our time." (Alberto Manguel).

"Karloff reported for work at 4:00 am, fortified by continual rounds of tea and cigarettes (and was endlessly photographed in his make-up, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.) The make-up took four hours to apply each morning, and he was padded up and out to 7 feet 6 inches with at least 50 pounds of suit and heavy weighted shoes. The long hours and grueling working conditions led directly to his becoming one of the founding members of the Screen Actors' Guild. The actor's suffering was real, and created an aura gentle pathos. Children were afraid of him, but wrote him fan letters none the less. As one of his biographers pointed out, what was the monster but a child whose parent no longer loves them?

 (below, Elsa Lanchester on the set, wrapped up in her work but still getting her 4 pm tea time with the rest of the cast.)    

      This despite the fact that "Frankenstein" incorporates a lot of German  Expressionism  (The cameraman was the German-born Karl Freund) adds greatly to the sense of menace that pervades the first to films of the Frankenstein series. 

Karloff himself became a major star after the film was released, also playing "The Mummy" (1932) and having a memorable turn as a crazed alcoholic butler chasing around poor Gloria Stuart in "The Old Dark House".  The latter film had many comic and macabre touches that later found their way into the sequel to the Promethean classic, "The Bride of Frankenstein".  

The latter film benefits in many ways from the first with the addition of the crazed Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesieger) who lures Dr Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive ) back into the reanimation business.  By the time the second film was made Clive himself was a dying man, with alcoholism and tuberculosis eating away at his health.)  

James Whale's own life, at least the last year of it, became the subject of a well-made Hollywood film in 1998 with Sir Ian McKellan, Brenden Fraser and the late (and very missed by many) Lynn Redgrave.  The film was "Gods and Monsters", based on a book about Whale's lifestyle as a gay man in the 1950's and his lost career and the pain  of separation he experiences from a wartime romance he tries to replicate four decades later,this time  with a young American man who is not gay. 

There is also a great film score by Franz Waxman in the 1935 film that makes the sequel one of the rare instances where a commercial film surpasses the original.            

Vampires, KIller Robots and Ghouls Beware! The Bob Wilkins/Creature Feature Phenomenon

It was Saturday Night in the Bay Area some time ago, 1971 to be exact, that I first came across the buttoned-down, low key television persona of Bob Wilkins, the host of "Creature Features".  He worked on  a local independent television station (KTVU-2) out of Oakland/San Francisco, hosting a program called "Creature Features".   The locally-produced show would present a newer horror film in the 9-11 pm slot, followed by an older, often classic horror film from the Universal or Hammer film catalog around 11.  What made Mr. Wilkins  memorable was the way he presented these movies.  

Those old enough to remember the horror movie craze that was directed at teens and pre-teens at the time probably recall television hosts who dressed up like characters out of "The Munsters" or "The Addams Family".  The generally hammed it up mercilessly while selling commercial products and introducing movies they played off as "scary" or "chilling".  Their were probably dozens of these local part-time "ghouls" in major markets, trying to scare up some ratings with the younger crowd not yet able to go out on Saturday Night.  

Wilkins  was decidedly different.  For one thing, he presented the films dressed as what one critic called "The Nerd-Hipster": the sort of television host who was a cross between comic intellectual Dick Cavett and the Anglo-American swell, Alister Cooke, of "Letter From America" and "Masterpiece Theater" fame. 

Here's some idea what I'm talking about:     

 Wilkins was famous for beginning his programs with admonishments if the film chosen for that evening by the program director was less than top-notch. "Don't stay up tonight," the host would warn. "It' not worth it". I remember being quite amused one weekend night as a kid when he opened up a copy of the tube-junkie's bible, "TV Guide" and began reading  aloud to viewers what was on other channels in the Bay Area and how discerning viewers would be better off checking out other option besides the trashy 'Dracula Vs. Frankenstein' (1971) film that was on for that night.

How did Wilkins get away with this and stay on the air? It was because he was honest about what he presented and, because of that, people who didn't normally watch horror films tuned in just for his ironic sense of wit and humorous asides to the main features.  The ratings for his shows were through the roof compared to other independent television offerings, according  to a recent article in San Francisco's "Metro" magazine. He also offered some interesting interviews with minor and sometimes major stars and directors and f/x people from the horror and fantasy side of the television and film industry.  

The 9:00 showing, as I said, was usually the newest and often the lesser of the double feature.      I'll spare you the bad previews and show one I remember that was on one night and was pretty good, 1973's "The Legend of Hell House", starring a good cast with a screenplay by top notch science-fiction writer Richard Matheson.  (Warning: the following contains scenes of "bad, bad kitty" behavior and the breaking of nice crockery.) 

   

The later show was the one I usually looked forward to.  Not all of them were classics, but they were films made by better and more experienced hands than those who cranked out flicks from the 50's and 60's with titles like "The Horror of Party Beach" and  "Attack of the Mushroom People".  And the photography was certainly better, as this video tribute to early sound horror films proves:

When Halloween comes around, I remember fondly all the  movies I saw as a youngster, some scary and some silly.  But, since he passed away this year at age 76, I also fondly recall the sarcasm and good humored fun that Bob Wilkins brought to the presentation of these "creature features."    

Pictured below: Northern California's favorite Saturday night horror film host, the inimitable Bob Wilkins, interviewing Christopher Lee on the set of "Creature Features" sometime in the 1970's. 

70th Anniversary of "War of the Worlds" Broadcast by Orson Welles on CBS Radio

Start:

Oct 30, '08 8:00p

The "Great Martian Invasion " broadcast was directed and starred 23 year-old boy wonder Orson Welles and his "Mercury Theater". The adaptation of H G Wells famous science-fiction novel was part of a series of dramatizations of famous popular novels that included "Dracula" and "Jane Eyre".
It was broadcast on Halloween Night, October 30th, 1938. It made Welles a household name overnight and established the impetus for his spotty career as a Hollywood director and his long tenure as an actor and international celebrity.

Below--From Market Watch Website:

NEW YORK, Oct 29, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ Tomorrow marks the 70th Anniversary of "War of the Worlds," the groundbreaking radio broadcast that terrified millions of Americans who thought that the fictional audio play was real and Martians were actually landing in Grover's Mill, New Jersey.
The original hour-long broadcast, which aired on the eve of Halloween, October 30, 1938, was part of CBS's Mercury Theatre On the Air, directed and narrated by Orson Welles, adapted from the H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds, with the audio play written by Howard Koch (writer of Casablanca). It simulated a live news report of a Martian invasion with a series of realistic newscasts seeming to interrupt regularly scheduled programming.
According to Ron Simon, Curator of Radio and Television, Paley Center for Media: "Blurring reality and fiction so seamlessly, Orson Welles established himself as a major artist, and helped to legitimize radio as an artistic medium and major force in American culture."
As part of the program, a fictional CBS news reporter tracks the Martians progress until he himself keels over ...
"Five great machines ... They rise like a line of new towers on the city's west side ... Now they're lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out ... black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They're running towards the East River ... thousands of them, dropping in like rats. Now the smoke's spreading faster. It's reached Times Square. People are trying to run away from it, but it's no use. They're falling like flies. Now the smoke's crossing Sixth Avenue ... Fifth Avenue ... a... a hundred yards away ... it's fifty feet ..."
The broadcast is said to have been heard by over 6 million people that night. According to historians, various factors contributed to the widespread reaction: Tensions were running high leading to World War II, the convincing natural delivery of the cast, long stretches of commercial free airplay and only three disclaimers during the broadcast clarifying its fictional nature. As a result, the show ignited a reaction of fear and confusion among listeners across the country. News reports cited people fleeing their homes, and police lines flooded with listeners trying to determine the validity of the Martian invasion.
The broadcast, considered one of the great moments in media history, continues to live-on through re-airings, live re-enactments and adaptations all over the world, introducing a new generation to the power of radio.
For more information and to listen to the entire original broadcast, please visit www.radioheardhere.com/waroftheworlds.

Dead Man Farming

I took this picture a couple days before Halloween out in the Applegate Valley, a rural part of Jackson County. Some lady or gent had a sense of humor over the holiday and decided to display a bony citizen and his pumpkin on their farming vehicle. The tractor obviously is in need of an oil change.

Thanks to the passage of Measure 49 in the state-wide off-year elections here in Oregon on Tuesday , there is a good chance that areas like the Applegate Valley--named for a pioneer family that came out West in 1843--will remain rural for a longer time than big timber and real estate interests might want. Despite a big advertising blitz on television, voters decided by a 60-40 margain to rein in development. Measure 49 only allows for limited conversions of farm land for commerical and residential use. I think controlled development inside urban growth boundries is a good thing. The dude on the tractor, however, was non-commital.

And this house near downtown Ashland also had residents in the haunting spirit. The last time I saw spiders that big I had too much to drink in the subtropics.